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Former amateur Yokozuna and world amateur sumo champion Hidetora Hanada heads to Colorado State University, chasing long-time dream of becoming NFL player

2023年07月18日(火) 15:21

Former amateur Yokozuna and World Games sumo champion Hidetora Hanada is now becoming a Colorado State Ram.

The sumo-wrestler-turned-defensive-lineman  announced that he is going to Colorado State University to play football in a press conference in Tokyo on Tuesday. It will be a step to make his childhood dream of becoming an NFL player come true, Hanada said.

“I’m very fortune to have a chance to go to  Colorado State and play football. It’s a challenge but I’m confident that I can go through it.,” said Hanada, who declared his desire to turn to football player in 2022. “It’s Japan’s national sport (sumo) is challenging American national sport (American football).”

Hanada started sumo in his childhood in Wakayama Prefecture and was a youth sumo champion by the time he was in the second grade of elementary school. He became the world junior champion in his sophomore and senior years in high school before winning national amateur sumo championships in 2020 as freshman at Nippon Sport Science University.

Despite the achievements in sumo, he always wanted to play football. The desire drove him to take part in a tryout held by some X League clubs at Fujitsu Stadium Kawasaki in March, 2022, and his pathway has been dramatically changed since then.

Hanada has been practicing with the two-time national champion Fujitsu Frontiers  as a practice squad player (he is not eligible to play for an X League team) since May last year, and developed enough to make the final roster of Japan All-Stars for  the Japan U.S. Dream Bowl, an international exhibition game against Ivy League All-Stars, in January though he made no action on the field in the game.

Eventually Hanada was called up for the CFL Combine in Edmonton in March, and his plays at the practice sessions immediately spread all over the world through SNS video postings by the X League and the CFL. Those videos urged some NCAA football coaches to contact Hanada, and Colorado State was one of them.

“I’m very excited and a little nervous to take classes at the university soon,” Hanada said. “But (playing for Colorado State) is not my goal. It’s just a process to make my dream come true.”